Hey, I see that the Discourse.net Sitemeter count over there in the right margin went over 3 million. I guess that says something, right?
I put more faith in the 'unique visitor' count, which is just over a million and I think might actually be meaningful, but most blogs use Sitemeter (probably because the numbers are higher, more egoboo) and I collect it so one can compare apples to apples. More than six thousand entries, more than 16,000 comments. Never would have guessed when I started all this.
Anyway, thanks for reading.
Posted inDiscourse.net|Comments Off on Three Million and Counting
In the wake of the Juan Williams firing (see Half Way to Pledge Week), a number of leading Republicans have called for the de-fuding of not just NPR but all public broadcasting. (Direct public funding of NPR is about 2% of its budget, but by the time you add up the indirect revenue it grows to about 20%. NPR is only a small part of federal spending on public broadcasting.)
This is overreach and likely will end badly for them, as it casts Republican grinches against Big Bird and Bert and Ernie.
Big Bird is popular with most Republicans…and he didn't fire Juan Williams.
PS. Somewhat irrelevantly, people are reviving old stories about Williams from 1991 (sorry, I'm not linking to it), in which it seems he engaged in an extended and shocking practice of aggressive sexual talk to female Washington Post staff and editors, seeming from the published reports to easily rise to a level amounting to harassment. This confirms my hunch that Juan Williams is not the sort of guy you want in your organization — unless you are Fox news, where I guess he'll fit right in and enjoy his new $2 million salary — but doesn't seem to me to be an issue in the latest firing. This behavior almost 20 years ago may say something about the person (or he may have changed), but he's not a candidate for office. It may go to the wisdom of hiring him or allowing him to be a commentator in first place but I don't see the relevance to his retention once he's been hired.
I've said for years that I wasn't going to give to NPR until they canned Juan Williams and Cokie Roberts, two wastes of airspace who routinely parrot conventional wisdom (leavened with the weekly GOP talking points) and call it “analysis”.
The report, “Tea Party Nationalism,” looks at the relationships and differences between the six major Tea Party organizations — FreedomWorks Tea Party, 1776 Tea Party, Tea Party Nation, Tea Party Patriots, ResistNet, and Tea Party Express — and the various ways that each group has established connections with, and empowers, outright racists and white supremacists, as well we far-right “Patriot” extremists of various stripes.
“In these ranks, an abiding obsession with Barack Obama's birth certificate is often a stand-in for the belief that the first black president of the United States is not a 'real American.' Rather than strict adherence to the Constitution, many Tea Partiers are challenging the provision for birthright citizenship found in the Fourteenth Amendment,” write authors Devin Burghart and Leonard Zeskind of the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, which produced the report for the NAACP.
Those conflicting rulings mean the U.S. Supreme Court will likely decide the issue.
The real issue is resources, said University of Miami law professor Michael Froomkin. When the courts first gave the government the right to remotely track suspects, no one thought they'd one day have the money or technology to do so constantly.
“There was an unstated assumption behind a great deal of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence in our history that says surveillance is expensive and therefore has natural limits,” he said. “That unstated assumption that people took for granted is no longer true.”
And therein, I think, lies the problem — we are working with doctrine that doesn't fit the new technical and economic realities.
In the wake of the Juan Williams firing (see 
